20 journals lost their impact factors in 2025 for citation manipulation, but coercive citation demands from editors remain undetectable and unpunished

In 2025, Clarivate suppressed impact factors for 20 journals due to excessive self-citation and citation stacking -- a significant escalation from 4 suppressions in 2023 and 17 in 2024. Citation manipulation takes multiple forms: editors explicitly demand that authors add 6-8 references to recent articles in the editor's own journal as a condition of acceptance, with no scholarly justification offered. Citation cartels form where editors of different journals agree to mutually inflate each other's citation counts. And individual authors engage in systematic self-citation rings, citing their own prior work regardless of relevance. The damage goes far beyond inflated metrics. Impact factors directly determine where researchers submit their best work, which journals libraries subscribe to, and how tenure committees evaluate candidates. When a journal's impact factor is artificially inflated through coercive citation, researchers submit papers there believing it to be a high-quality venue. Their work is then associated with a journal that is subsequently flagged for manipulation. Libraries pay subscription fees calibrated to a fraudulent metric. And hiring committees comparing candidates from different fields use impact factors as a cross-disciplinary yardstick, meaning a candidate who published in a citation-manipulated journal appears more productive than a candidate who published in an honest one. The metric that was supposed to measure quality becomes a tool for gaming quality. Coercive citation persists because it is nearly impossible to prove and carries no individual penalty. When an editor emails an author saying 'please consider citing recent work in our journal,' the line between legitimate editorial suggestion and coercive manipulation is subjective. Authors comply because refusing risks rejection. The author cannot report the behavior without jeopardizing their submission. Even when Clarivate suppresses a journal's impact factor, the suppression is temporary (typically one year), the manipulating editors face no personal consequences, and the journal can resume normal operations once the metric recovers. There is no equivalent of a 'ban' for editors caught manipulating citations, and no whistleblower protection for authors who report coercive demands.